Publications

Many ungulates migrate between distinct summer and winter ranges, and identifying, mapping, and conserving these migration corridors have become a focus of local, regional, and global conservation efforts. Brownian bridge movement models (BBMMs) are commonly used to empirically identify these seasonal migration corridors; however, they require location data sampled at relatively frequent...

Increasing wildfire frequency and severity in high-elevation seasonal snow zones presents a considerable water resource management challenge across the western United States (U.S.). Wildfires can affect snowpack accumulation and melt patterns, altering the quantity and timing of runoff. While prior research has shown that wildfire generally increases snow melt rates and advances snow...

The seasonal behavior of fluvial dissolved silica (DSi) concentrations, termed DSi regime, mediates the timing of DSi delivery to downstream waters and thus governs river biogeochemical function and aquatic community condition. Previous work identified five distinct DSi regimes across rivers spanning the Northern Hemisphere, with many rivers exhibiting multiple DSi regimes over time...

Mount Rainier has had at least 11 large lahars over the last 6,000 years, including one occurring without evidence of eruptive activity. This prompted the creation of a lahar detection system that uses a combination of seismic, infrasound, and tripwires. We test a laser rangefinder placed on a river channel bank for detecting and confirming mass movements flowing past a station as an...

The ongoing panzootic of highly pathogenic H5 clade 2.3.4.4b avian influenza (HPAI) spread to North America in late 2021, with detections of HPAI viruses in Alaska beginning in April 2022. HPAI viruses have since spread across the state, affecting many species of wild birds as well as domestic poultry and wild mammals. To better understand the dissemination of HPAI viruses...

Plants adjust their allocation to different organs based on nutrient supply. In some plant species, symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live in root nodules provide an alternate pathway for nitrogen acquisition. Does access to nitrogen-fixing bacteria modify plants' biomass allocation? We hypothesized that access to nitrogen-fixing bacteria would have the same effect on...

Dietary decisions by predators can affect prey abundance and overall food web dynamics. Many predators do not forage on the same prey at the same frequency throughout their lives. Ontogenetic shifts in prey preference are not, however, often accounted for when modeling food web relationships, despite growing literature that suggests that stage specific dietary relationships may be an...

Coastal jetties are commonly used throughout the world to stabilize channels and improve navigation through inlets. These engineered structures form artificial boundaries to littoral cells by reducing wave-driven longshore sediment transport across inlet entrances. Consequently, beaches adjacent to engineered inlets are subject to large gradients in longshore transport rates and are...

Understanding per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) mass distribution in surface and groundwater systems can support source prioritization, load reduction, and water management. Thirteen sites within an urban catchment were sampled utilizing a time-of-travel sampling approach to minimize the influence of subdaily fluctuations in mass from PFAS point sources and to quantify PFAS and...

Fish recruitment is interannually variable and challenging to predict. Annual recruitment is often regionally synchronized among populations and identifying drivers of such synchrony may help shed light on recruitment dynamics. We investigated interannual variation of alewife Alosa pseudoharengus recruitment by estimating year-class strength for populations from three of the Laurentian...

Trade-offs among objectives in natural resource management can be exacerbated in altered ecosystems and when there is uncertainty in predicted management outcomes. Multi-criteria decision analysis and value of information (VOI) are underutilized decision tools that can assist fisheries managers in handling trade-offs and evaluating the importance of uncertainty. We demonstrate the use of...

A core aspiration of the ecological sciences is to determine how systems work, which implies the challenge of developing a causal understanding. Causal inference has long been approached from a statistical perspective, which can be limited and restrictive for a variety of reasons. Ecologists and other natural scientists have historically pursued mechanistic knowledge as an alternative...